Why You Should Share Your Images With Vendors?
As a wedding or event photographer, you have an amazing opportunity to use your skills and talent to help other business owners. Every business, regardless of industry or size, needs professional images. On a wedding day or at a corporate event there are dozens of vendors who have played a role. Often vendors take a few images of their hard work themselves, either with a basic camera or a phone but their images couldn’t match the quality yours could provide for them.
WHY SHARE YOUR IMAGES?
Sharing your images with vendors can be mutually beneficial. By providing other business owners with professional images means that they can improve and grow their portfolio and therefore gain more business. Equally, by displaying your work in various industries you are gaining free and extra advertising that could lead to more inquiries and bookings.
HOW SHOULD YOU START SHARING IMAGES?
In our previous blog post, we talked about creating client homework. If you are a wedding photographer we mentioned contacting the couple before the wedding day to ask about the wedding timeline. This is also a chance to find out the vendors involved on the wedding day. Equally, if you are an event photographer you probably want to send something similar to the event hosts asking about the timeline of the event and any other businesses/vendors that are contributing.
Try to cover all the bases by asking for the company’s name, email address, phone number and website. Next, you’ll want to create a spreadsheet (either in Excel or Google Sheets) to enter all their information. Create columns for ‘Vendor Type’ e.g. makeup artist, caterers, florist etc, company name, contact name, email address, website and you could even go one step further and research the links to their Facebook page, Twitter username and Instagram username. Over time you’ll build up a large database of vendors that you can contact again in the future and perhaps add to your referral circle?
After the wedding or event gallery has been delivered to the clients, send out a friendly email to each vendor involved introducing yourself. I would recommend doing this regardless of whether you had the chance to talk at the event itself as it’s often hard to remember everyone that was there on the day. Then link to the gallery and encourage vendors to download whatever images they would like to use for their business advertising. Of course, you should ask for credit to your website or blog and note that if the images are shared on social media they must tag your social media names.
WAYS YOU CAN SHARE CLIENT FILES…
Create a new collection and enable free downloads, then use the Image toolbar “copy” function to add the images to your new collection. Send the password for the new collection to your suppliers.
If it is just a few images, you can create a download of the particular files. From the edit collection page, click the thumbnail of the image you want as a download to view the file information page. You will find “Download Link” at the bottom of the page.
I realise that creating a spreadsheet to keep track of all the vendors at an event can seem daunting so we’ve created a template that you can easily customise and alter to suit your needs. We’ve tried to cover the main photography genres that we think would benefit from sharing their images with vendors, so you can now download the spreadsheets for newborn, event or wedding photography here. If we’ve missed a genre let us know in the comments!
Do you already share your images with vendors? If so how has it benefited your business? Would you consider sharing your images with event/wedding vendors?